Tom Cruise Will Actually Go to Outer Space For New Action Movie

Tom Cruise has made action movies dangling from the top of giant skyscrapers. He’s jumped out of planes. He’s flown helicopters and fighter jets. So it had to happen eventually: Tom Cruise is going into outer space.

It’s long been a punchline that the only way the Mission: Impossible franchise could top itself now was to turn Tom Cruise into an actual astronaut. Welp, according to Deadline, Cruise is teaming up with Elon Musk’s Space X company on a movie that will not only be set in space, it would actually be shot in space:

I’m hearing that Tom Cruise and Elon Musk’s Space X are working on a project with NASA that would be the first narrative feature film – an action adventure – to be shot in outer space. It’s not a Mission: Impossible film and no studio is in the mix at this stage but look for more news as I get it. But this is real, albeit in the early stages of liftoff.

This isn’t the first time Tom Cruise has flirted with a project that would let him go to actual outer space. Back around the year 2000, Cruise batted around making a space movie in space with none other than Terminator and Avatar director James Cameron. “I had a contract with the Russians in 2000 to go to the International Space Station and shoot a high-end 3D documentary there,” Cameron told Empire. “And I thought, ‘S—, man, we should just make a feature.’ I said, ‘Tom, you and I, we’ll get two seats on the Soyuz, but somebody’s gotta train us as engineers.’ Tom said, ‘No problem, I’ll train as an engineer.’ We had some ideas for the story, but it was still conceptual.”

At this point, Cameron’s not involved in this film (he’s busy making his own space movies, four Avatar sequels, albeit without going into the actual upper atmosphere). Still, Tom Cruise in outer space doing space stuff sounds too good to be true for action fans. In the meantime, the next two Mission: Impossible movies were recently delayed due to the coronvirus pandemic; they’re now due in theaters on November 19, 2021 and August 5, 2022.